Abby and Julia Smith and “Votey” and “Taxey,” Their Cows

In June 1957, American
Heritage magazine featured an article by
Elizabeth
George Speare about the tax resistance of Abby and Julia Smith:

In two dead-game spinsters who wouldn’t be unfairly taxed, the men of
Glastonbury met their match and the cause of feminism found a bovine cause
célèbre.

Abby, Julia, and the Cows

In the early morning of January 8, 1874, a
momentous procession moved along the quiet Main Street of the small New
England town of Glastonbury, Connecticut. Led by an implacable town official,
who doubled as constable and tax collector, seven Alderney cows plodded
toward the auction block, their reluctant progress urged by four men, a dog,
and a drum. Behind followed some forty-odd local citizens with teams of
horses, and in the rear, black-bonneted heads high, their resolute spines
never touching the backs of the wagon seats, rode two frail little elderly
ladies. The scene was, in the words of a Hartford correspondent, “a fit
centennial celebration of the Boston Tea Party.” Justice was at stake, and
the seven cows, like the chests of tea, were destined to become a national
symbol.

The embattled owners of the cows were Julia Smith and her sister Abby. Though
these two were quietly living out the closing years of a long and uneventful
life — Julia was 82 and Abby 77 — they were not wholly unacquainted with
notoriety. They were the last remaining members of a family of nonconformists
who for half a century had nonplussed the small community of Glastonbury.

Zephaniah Hollister Smith, father of the sisters, was a native of
Glastonbury, born in 1786. A graduate of Yale, a
scholar, linguist, and mechanical genius, he began, as an ordained minister
in western Connecticut, a career which he soon found irreconcilable to his
conviction that the gospel should not be preached for money. Legend has it
that in the resultant dispute with his parishioners he sweepingly
excommunicated the entire parish and was in turn excommunicated by them.
Leaving the ministry, he undertook the study of law and presently set up a
practice in his native Glastonbury.

Zephaniah married Hannah Hadassah Hickock, herself a linguist, mathematician,
astronomer, and poet. On their five daughters these two seem to have bestowed
an incredible legacy of talent, as well as an impressive collection of names:
Hancy Zephina, Cyrinthia Sacretia, Laurilla Aleroyla, Julia Evelina, and Abby
Hadassah.

The five sisters never married, perhaps, as rumor implies, because of a pact
made in early youth, perhaps because few suitors in that small town could
have measured up to their formidable requirements. Legend tells of one
persistent young man who was so unresponsive to hints that the sisters were
forced to deal with him plainly. “Now,” one of them said at last, “we are all
busy. But if you will tell us which one of us you prefer, she will remain and
the rest of us will continue our work and not waste our time.” The caller
took one startled look around the circle. “Damned if I know,” he stammered,
and, seizing his hat, departed, never to return.

For 32 years Julia Smith kept a diary in French and Latin, in which are
recorded the minutiae of quiet days filled with good works. The Smith sisters
read and studied, tended their farm, wove and spun, drank tea with their
friends, nursed the sick, and took food to the destitute.

Under the spirited guidance of their mother, however, their imaginations
ranged wide. The antislavery movement in particular fired their ardent
sympathies. When William Lloyd Garrison was denied Hartford pulpits, the
sisters invited him to give his abolitionist speeches from a convenient stump
on the Smith front lawn, and they were zealous distributors of the
Charter Oak, an antislavery paper. One of the
earliest anti-slavery petitions, presented before Congress by John Quincy
Adams, was drawn up by Hannah Hickock Smith and bore the names of forty women
of Glastonbury.

In the year 1873, when woman suffrage had become
a fiery issue, only Julia and Abby remained in the spacious white homestead.
Less and less frequently now did they appear in public. Probably they would
have been content to cheer their suffragist sisters from their own fireside,
had it not been for an affair which involved not only freedom, justice, and
equality, but objects even nearer to the sisters’ hearts: their pet Alderney
cows.

In November of 1873 the town tax collector
called at the Smith homestead with a notice that the property had been
reassessed and $100 added to its value. The property of two widows of the
town had likewise risen in value, while not one acre owned by the
voting-males of Glastonbury had been reappraised. Such high-handed treatment
could not fail to arouse the Smith sense of justice. “To be sure,” Abby
wrote later, “it increased our tax but little, but what is unjust in least is
unjust in much.” In a furor of moral indignation, Abby, always the more
practical and energetic of the two, composed a speech which so surprised the
scholarly and retiring Julia that she agreed to appear with her sister at a
Glastonbury town meeting.

Disconcerting as their presence must have been in that masculine sanctum, the
Glastonbury gentlemen received the two elderly women indulgently and granted
Abby permission to speak. No wonder Julia had been awed. “The motto of our
government,” Abby declared, “is ‘proclaim liberty to all the inhabitants of
the land,’ and here, where liberty is so highly extolled and glorified by
every man in it, one half of the inhabitants are not put under the law, but
are ruled over by the other half, who can… take all they possess. How is
liberty pleased with such worship?”

“All we ask of the town,” she concluded her lengthy and spirited plea, “is
not to rule over them as they rule over us, but to be on an equality with
them.”

The town voters received the speech in complete silence, and at its end
resumed the business of the meeting as though the interruption had never
occurred. Julia and Abby returned home with hardened resolution. Taxation
without representation had been out of fashion for a hundred years; they
would pay no further taxes to the town of Glastonbury until they could have
some say in the town spending. When the collector called again they informed
him that “it really does not belong to us to assist in any way, having no
voice in the matter.”

It was customary at that time for property-holding women to be represented
“constructively” at town meetings by their male relatives. The Smith sisters
had no means of representation. Furthermore, it was allowable for any citizen
to withhold taxes upon payment of twelve per cent interest, and the sisters
were aware that thousands of dollars in taxes were at that time outstanding.
No such privilege was extended to the old ladies. Instead, the collector
attached seven of the Smith cows for taxes amounting to $101.39. Despite the
sisters’ pleading, the cows were led, with considerable difficulty, out of
their familiar stable and lodged for seven days in the small tobacco shed of
a neighbor.

The officials soon discovered that they had no ordinary cows on their hands.
These creatures had been delicately and lovingly reared. They responded at a
gallop to the names of Jessie, Daisy, Proxy, Minnie, Bessie, Whitey, and
Lily. They were so emotionally dependent that every day of their captivity
they refused to be milked until Julia came and stood reassuringly in sight.
Their plaintive lowing rent the sisters’ hearts and distracted the neighbors.

On the morning when the cows marched to the auction block, the Glastonbury
citizens who had come expecting to buy some fine Alderney cows for a song
were chagrined to find that the Smith sisters, while refusing to pay a tax of
$101.39, were prepared to outbid all comers to redeem their pets. The Smiths’
agent bought back four of the cows but was obliged to sacrifice the others.

It was the editor of the Springfield, Massachusetts,
Republican who first recognized in an amusing
local incident implications of national importance. He reprinted Abby’s
entire speech and ran a flag-waving account of her first skirmish with the
tax collector, adding that “Abby Smith and her sister as truly stand for the
American principle as did the citizens who ripped open the tea chests in
Boston Harbor, or the farmers who leveled their muskets at Concord.… It will
not be creditable if Abby Smith and her sister are left to stand alone… to
fight the battle of principle unaided.” Without the sisters’ knowledge the
editor proposed an Abby Smith defense fund and solicited contributions.

As money and encouragement began to pour in, editors across the country
sensed that a good fight was just beginning. A writer in
Harper’s Weekly referred to Abby Smith as “Sam
Adams redivivus.” Overnight the seven cows of Glastonbury became so famous
that flowers made from hairs of their tails, tied with ribbons bearing the
slogan “Taxation without Representation,” were featured at a bazaar in
Chicago.

National leaders of woman suffrage respectfully welcomed the sisters to a
place of honor in their ranks. Lucy Stone traveled to Glastonbury to meet
them and wrote back to the Woman’s Journal: “Here
some day, as to Bunker Hill now, will come men and women who are reverent of
the great principle of the consent of the governed, who respect courage and
fidelity to principle, and who will hold at its true value the part which
these sisters have taken in solving the meaning of a representative
government.”

Abby’s first taste of public speaking had apparently been exhilarating. In
February, 1874, the two sisters accepted an
invitation to appear at a convention on woman suffrage at Worcester,
Massachusetts, where Abby made another spirited appeal, ending on the defiant
note: “I fear we shall receive no mercy at their hands, and must rest content
that they can’t shut us up as they did our cows, and what is worse still they
cannot shut our mouths.”

Glastonbury males could refuse to listen, however. When in April the sisters
appeared for a second time at the town meeting, Abby’s petition to speak was
denied. Undaunted, Abby mounted an old wagon which stood outside the town
hall, pulled from her pocket the speech she had prepared, and directed her
vigorous logic toward a handful of curious spectators. Julia circulated among
the audience, emphasizing her sister’s arguments by the vehement little jerks
of her head that were forever sending her black bonnet down over one ear.

Unimpressed, the tax collector called once more with the suggestion that the
ladies might now be ready to pay. “We cannot think it right to do so,” they
replied, “and you will have to do as you think best in the matter.”

Remembering the contrary cows, the tax collector thought best to make an
oblique attack upon them. The sisters anticipated the removal of their
furniture and were righteously ignoring their friends’ advice to remove to
safety Laurilla’s paintings which adorned every wall. Instead, an
inconspicuous advertisement in the Hartford
Courant announced the sale at public auction of
fifteen acres of Smith pasture land on June
20, a date contrived to fall just before the grass would be cut.
Though the sisters set out on that day with ample funds, the collector
adroitly shifted the meeting place, and when the two women caught up with the
auction, the gavel had just gone down transferring for $78.35 land worth
nearly $2,000 to none other than a covetous neighbor who had tried for years
to get possession of it.

Abby and Julia were daughters of a lawyer. They brought suit against tax
collector George C. Andrews on the grounds that he had violated a law which
plainly stated that movable property must first be sold for unpaid taxes
before real estate could be seized. The case was tried in the home of Judge
Hollister of Glastonbury, who gave a verdict in favor of the sisters and
fined Andrews damages of $10. Threatening terrible consequences, Andrews
appealed the case.

The new trial, which lasted three days in the Hartford Court of Common Pleas,
had a farcical aspect. There were misplaced records; there was distorted
evidence. The judge, in absentia, reversed the Glastonbury
decision and decided in favor of collector Andrews. At this point the Smiths’
lawyer backed out. Abby and Julia, both now in their eighties, began the
study of law with the intention of conducting their own case. Happily a
capable lawyer finally agreed to place a second appeal before the Court of
Equity.

For two years a wide and sympathetic public followed this devious litigation.
Across the nation, even in England and France, editors and columnists lauded
the Glastonbury cows in prose and poetry. Reporters visited the town, drank
tea in the elm-shaded farmhouse, admired the cows, polled public opinion in
Glastonbury, and returned with highly flavored and often inaccurate stories.
With whatever condescension these reporters arrived, they seem, one and all,
to have found the Smith sisters irresistible. The hospitality, wit, and charm
of the two elderly spinsters captivated the world beyond Glastonbury.

At about this time press accounts of the Alderney cows began to be
embellished with holy scripture. Years before Julia had made a translation of
the Bible. Purely for her own satisfaction, suspecting that the King James
version which was read in her weekly Bible study club was not altogether
accurate, she had pursued the truth through the Latin and Greek Testaments.
Finding that the exact meaning still eluded her, she had secured textbooks
and, when well past middle age, had taught herself the Hebrew language. In
1847 she had begun, word by word, a translation
of the original sources. In the next nine
years she had made not one but five complete translations of both Old
and New Testaments, two from the Greek, one from the Latin, and two from the
Hebrew. In the final copy she was satisfied that she had recorded, as
faithfully as is humanly possible, the literal meaning of every word from
Genesis to Revelation.

This incredible manuscript had lain on her library shelf for
twenty years. Julia had never intended to
make it public, but she now reasoned that it might be of value to the
suffrage cause as proof of what a mere woman had accomplished. In
1876 she arranged with a Hartford firm for its
publication. To warnings that she was throwing her money away she replied
that she did not care if she never sold a copy; she thought it “more sensible
to spend $1,000 on printing a Bible than to buy a shawl.”

Julia’s Bible made an impressive witness. But much of the nation’s interest
in the Glastonbury case was the work of Abby, who willingly took pen in hand
to keep her public informed. Though she once reminded a Toledo editor that
she could not give quite so much time to answering such distant requests, she
seems to have welcomed every opportunity to recount, in her pungent style, a
tale which lost nothing in constant retelling. There is no sentimentality in
Abby’s letters. In fact the humor and zest which animate her accounts of
hardship and persecution leave more than a suspicion that it was with the
utmost enjoyment that the two frail victims awaited the next move. As Abby
remarked to one young reporter, “It is some comfort that the collector and
his abettors are as much puzzled as we are to know what is to be done with us
next.”

Twice more in the year of 1876 the cows paraded
to auction. But the collector had underestimated his adversaries. Abby and
Julia were convinced that they fought on the side of the angels. Even when
events went against them, their dignity and spunk seemed to turn every defeat
into a moral victory. When the final verdict was made in their favor, in
November of 1876, women the country over
rejoiced. To be sure, Julia and Abby did not vote in Glastonbury, but from
that time on their property was undisturbed.

Abby Smith lived to enjoy the victory for two years, and to see her letters
and speeches collected in a paper-bound volume entitled
Abby Smith and Her Cows, published by Julia in
1877. The two sisters shared honors as speakers
at a number of suffrage conventions, got an ovation in Washington, and even
appeared at a hearing before the United States Senate. The only impression
made on the home town by these triumphs seems to have been raised eyebrows
that the sisters had gone to see the President without even taking a
suitcase, but had worn all their clothes at once, simply putting on top, day
or night, whatever costume the occasion required.

Romance is not entirely missing from the story of the Smith sisters. At the
age of 87, living alone in the Smith homestead, Julia received a proposal of
marriage. One of her pamphlets reached the hands of Amos A. Parker of
Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, a retired judge of 86, whose sole claim to
distinction was that he had once written a book of recollections boasting a
youthful acquaintance with General Lafayette. Intrigued by a notice of
Julia’s Bible, he ordered a copy and after some correspondence traveled to
Glastonbury to meet the author. Presently Julia announced to a friend that
she was thinking of marrying the judge. “I shall be the laughingstock of the
nation,” she confided. But the Smith sisters had never been intimidated by
laughter, Julia and the judge were married in the living room of the
homestead and stood side by side watching their friends dance the polka and
quadrille to the accompaniment of an ancient piano.

To add that the couple lived happily ever after is a temptation several
chroniclers have been unable to resist. But rumor persists in Glastonbury
that Julia came to realize that in her marriage she had made the one serious
mistake of her life. What pathetic loneliness must have lured her to abandon
the homestead, with its treasure of memories, for a “small box of a house” in
alien Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire! For seven years she made the best of her
bargain. At her death there at the age of 94, a note was found in her Bible
requesting that she be buried in the family plot between Laurilla and Abby,
and that her maiden name only be inscribed on the stone with that of her
sisters.

The debt the woman suffrage movement owed to the seven cows of Glastonbury
would be hard to reckon. Among the grimly purposeful suffrage tracts this
little episode must have sparkled like a jewel, and Abby’s pithy letters,
heartening of course to the vast voteless sisterhood, must also have reached
many a masculine ear ordinarily deaf to feminine harangues.

“Abby Smith and her cows are marching on like John Brown’s soul,” wrote
Isabella Beecher Hooker. “I am not sure that ‘kine couchant’ on the grassy
slope of the beautiful Connecticut should not be adopted as the emblem of our
peaceful suffrage banner.”

“The cows are again complacently chewing their cuds in Abby Smith’s
comfortable barn,” reported the Boston Herald in
1874, “but the case has given a tough cud to the
country to chew upon until the New Declaration of Independence is achieved
and Abby Smith votes.”

The Lewiston Evening Journal for
20 June 1952 carried
Westbrook Pegler’s column boosting the
U.S. Senate
candidacy of upstart Vivien Kellems against the New England Republican
establishment. (Kellems ran as an “Independent Republican” but got fewer than
5% of the votes of the winning Republican candidate.) Kellems was a tireless
tax resister whose exploits have been recounted here before. The Pegler column
includes some interesting notes on other conservative tax resistance actions of
the time:

Vivien Kellems has been flapping around in planes year after year, making
speeches against the income and withholding taxes and inciting women to
patriotic rebellion. Nobody knows the history of the income tax better. The
real rebellion of the time is led by women. The Marshall girls, of Marshall,
Tex., refused to pay the
baby-sitters’ tax. Vivien flew down to give them counsel and now Mrs. Winifred
Furrh, of Marshall, reports that only 20,000 households out of 50,000 in the
Dallas Internal Revenue district have even filed returns under this section.

From Bethel, Vermont comes a carbon copy of a Social Security return, proudly
sent by Lucille Miller, a rebel against the Communist invasion up there.
Across the face runs the loud defi: “Go to Hell, you cheap parasites!” The
amount was $5.07.

In Summit, Miss., Mrs.
Mary D. Cain, the editor of the weekly Sun, refused to pay Social Security,
closed her bank account, announced that her husband wasn’t responsible for
her debts and dared John Snyder, the secretary of the Treasury, to do
something.

Lucille Miller also did time for encouraging military draft evasion in
1955. The judge in the case declared her insane
and ordered her locked up, and she was captured under a storm of tear gas
after a brief siege of her house and not released until she won a federal
court order. She was later found guilty of “18 counts of counseling young men
to evade the Selective Service Act” and given a two-year suspended sentence.
The U.S. Court of
Appeals turned down her appeal.

She published a zine, The Green Mountain Rifleman,
which is usually described as “anti-communist” in the press of the day, but
I’ve also seen it referred to as anti-semitic. Having not seen any copies
myself, it’s hard for me to say.

Winifred Furrh was one of the “Texas housewives” whose case I covered
last year.

Texas Housewives In Tax Revolt — Federal warrants for refusing to pay social
security taxes on wages of domestic help are studied in Marshall, Texas, by
housewives (seated, l to
r.) Mrs. Virginia Whelan and
Mrs. Winifred Furrh; and standing, Mrs. Carolyn Abney (left) and Mrs.
Etheldrea Spangler. Mrs. Abney spoke for the group, which includes 14 others,
when she announced a “wait and see” policy in the dispute, involving only $54.
The warrants authorize seizure of property. (International Soundphoto.)

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